Green Party of Pennsylvania endorsed Cheri Honkala at their State Convention on January 29. Honkala will campaign as the Green Party candidate in a Special Election scheduled for March 21. She ran for Sheriff of Philadelphia in 2011 and for Vice President of the U.S. in 2012.

"Democrats have been playing games with our lives in Philadelphia and especially inDistrict 197, and I plan to do everything I can to change that in Harrisburg," Honkala said at the GPOP meeting in Roxborough.

Honkala, a formerly homeless, single mother, co-founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991 and, in 1998, launched the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, where she currently serves as the National Coordinator.

"Cheri has worked tirelessly on behalf of families who face homelessness and poverty long before she ever considered running for office,"said Galen Tyler, chair of the GPOP City Committee. "She knows their pain and the real struggles they face everyday because she has walked in their shoes."

Chris Robinson, the GPOP membership secretary, declared, "The Green Party is proud to run a candidate with Honkala's qualifications, dynamism and unbridled opposition to poverty."

The Special Election is scheduled for Tuesday, March 21, to fill the seat left vacant by convicted felon Leslie Acosta (Democrat), who resigned in January after pleading guilty to a federal felony charge of conspiring to commit money laundering.

The Green Party is an independent political party founded on the four pillars of nonviolence, grassroots democracy, ecological wisdom and social justice. For information about the next Green Party meeting, please call 215-843-4256 or emailgpop@gpop.org. Visit the Green Party of Philadelphia's website atwww.gpop.org.

As Chrissie Hynde says, "Life's a canvas and I'm on it" ("Alone" on the new Pretenders album).

It's a pity that Obama's "regime change" wars did not move liberals to protest the same way Trump's refugee ban did.

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Back in August of 2014, the US government began bombing Iraq daily.

The bombings continue.

Yesterday, the US Defense Dept announced:

Strikes in IraqBomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft and rocket
artillery conducted five strikes in 19 engagements in Iraq, coordinated
with and in support of Iraq’s government:-- Near Kisik, a strike engaged an ISIL staging area. Near Mosul, four strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and
an ISIL staging area; destroyed three fighting positions, two vehicles,
two vehicle bomb factories, a tunnel entrance, a supply cache and a
weapons cache; and damaged a supply route.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic
events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a
single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a
single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle
is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons
against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for
example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or
impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not
report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number
of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual
munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in
counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a
strike.

On these daily bombings, REUTERS reports, "Eleven civilians
were killed in four separate air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition
fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between Oct. 25 and Dec. 9, the
U.S. military said on Thursday."

In Basra today, ALSUMARIA reports, hundreds of Iraqis turned out to protest in the dispute over a waterway between Iraq and neighboring Kuwait.

The new US President Donald Trump criticized his predecessor Barack
Obama several times. He said that Obama has left Iraq an easy target for
the Iranians, squandering $3 trillion efforts deployed by the US to
build an allied Iraq.

The Iranian
authorities sent Trump indirect threatening messages instead of
reassuring ones. They ordered one of their many militias in Iraq,
al-Nujaba movement, to fire missiles in order to show its strength.
Al-Nujaba is one of the militias that can target neighboring countries
and is similar to the Yemeni Houthis that are also used by Iran to bomb
Saudi Arabia with missiles financed by them.

Iran’s
threat in Iraq is not just for the neighboring Gulf countries but
rather a threat against Iraqis first and then against the surrounding
countries.

Iran’s main objective is to
seize Iraq, which is the second-richest country in the region, to
finance its economic and military needs. During the past six years, Iran
has converted Iraq into an Iranian military base, from which it wages
its wars in Syria, and threatens Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards brags about not
costing the Iranian treasury any money on foreign military activities in
Syria and Iraq, because it depends on the Iraqi treasury that has
become its financial portfolio and under the control of pro-Iranian
groups after marginalizing the authorities of current Iraqi Prime
Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Meanwhile, ALSUMARIA reports roads to Baghdad's Tahrir Square were cut off in an attempt to halt today's protest
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